A Word from Our Sponsors

In his novel “Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, David Foster Wallace imagined a near future in which the Organization of North American Nations—a single nation-state comprised of the former Mexico, United States, and Canada—had for various reasons adopted a policy known as “Revenue-Enhancing Subsidized TimeTM.” In this scheme, calendar years are sponsored by corporations; as a result, they are no longer identified by sequential numerals but instead by product names. Subsidized time began with the “Year of the Whopper.” The action of the novel takes place several product sponsorships later, in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which came after the “Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland” and before the “Year of Glad.”

Wallace’s novel was prophetic in all kinds of ways (one example is its prescience about the rise of personalized entertainment viewed in private)—but it was this outlandish satire about the calendar that came to mind recently, when the Times reported on the cash-strapped city of Brazil, Indiana (a name that sounds like one of Wallace’s post-national composites), which recently sold the naming rights of failing fire hydrants in need of repair. For the past month in Brazil, arson victims and overheated children alike have gotten their water delivered by hydrants brought to them by KFC Fiery Grilled Wings.

We’re surely a ways from a nationally recognized Year of the Fiery Grilled Wings, but maybe not as far as we might hope. The Times story notes other examples of local governments turning to advertising to help cover widening budget shortfalls: Baltimore is considering turning its fire engines into mobile billboards; Cleveland has renamed its entire bus system the HealthLine, after getting millions of dollars in sponsorship from the Cleveland Clinic; Chicago and Boston are selling naming rights to train stations; and even though the new Barclays Center isn’t scheduled to open until the fall, New Yorkers can already take the 2, 3, 4, 5, B, D, N, Q, or R trains to the renamed Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center stop in Brooklyn. (New recorded message: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please—and sorry that we messed with those lending rates.”) And cities are thinking of moving beyond such examples of obvious synergy to selling the naming rights to parks and municipal buildings.

If this all seems inevitable—if we’re resigned to the fact that people of some subsequent generation will take their grandchildren to see the Southwest Airlines Grand Canyon or the Lincoln Financial Lincoln Memorial—it is partly due to the fact that these kinds of civic-corporate overlaps have long been a part of the culture. American sports fans, for example, long ago accepted that their favorite teams are doomed not only to play in such venues as Heinz Field, but in places with crushingly, almost provocatively absurd names, like PETCO Park (San Diego), O.co Coliseum (Oakland), or Jobing.com Arena (Glendale, Arizona). Such names are not just modern developments, however, as many of our public spaces bear names that point to their corporate pasts. Times Square was known as Longacre Square until Adolph Ochs moved his newspaper there at the beginning of the twentieth century and strong-armed city officials into changing its name. The persistence of marketers and mapmakers made it stick, and the creep of time de-commodified it, turning what was once a business deal into a civic landmark. (Times Square, of course, has always been a laboratory for the American capitalist experiment, host through the years of everything from horse stables to topless bars to the American Girl store.)

Reading about Indiana’s “fiery” hydrants elicited one of those slightly eerie moments when it feels as though we are living in the future. While the slow drift toward the corporate end times may have a long backstory, we are drawing closer to a cultural relationship with products and mass entertainment that once existed only in speculative fiction. (Of course, this is natural: as time progresses, the world rightly, and often unfortunately, begins to resemble what was predicted by the most brilliant and imaginative artists of the past.) In “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s wry and, at times, cloying repetition (often in the form of acronyms) of all those goofy year titles is one of the many ways in which he uses a hyperbolic marketing-crazed future to satirize his marketing-crazed present. The book’s most memorable argument—that entertainment will eventually become so captivating as to be debilitating, and even deadly—is of a kind with many moments in fiction in which people of the future destroy themselves through their urges to consume. It is a key element in literature ranging from science fiction to literary theory that as the barriers of individual consciousness degrade we absorb a kind of shared cultural consciousness full of corporate junk. In this version of dystopia, advertising becomes more pervasive, consumer culture supplants traditional culture, and language itself, from place names to common nouns, is subsumed by the things we buy and sell.

Much science fiction posits a future dominated by a de-facto corporate state, wherein traditional government is either totally absent or entirely subservient to the power of a single giant company. In such a scenario, all elements of public life become branded by the people in charge: the logo of the corporate state is stamped on every available surface, language is bent to reflect the new idea of omnipotent economic forces, and marketing, both conventional and based on new technologies, becomes the central agent of control exercised by the powerful over the masses. This vision appears in many genres: in the science-fiction writing of Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein, in comic books, in more sci-fi action films than you can name, and, perhaps most essentially, in the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson. And it features in a genre we might call literary-establishment speculative fiction, examples of which include Thomas Pynchon’s alternate-reality nineteen-sixties in “The Crying of Lot 49,” Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake,” Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” and, to take a recent example, Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story,” a novel in which, though the world hasn’t yet come under the thumb of corporations, it certainly seems headed in that direction, as people are employed by and invest in such brands as “ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandViacomCredit” and “LandO’LakesGMFordCredit.”

Though this theme of slow corporate strangulation points to the future, it nonetheless offers two simultaneous arguments about the present: that the power of corporations is reaching a level equal to that of traditional states, and that traditional states themselves are beginning to act more and more like corporations, or, through various entanglements, have grown inseparable from them. Yet a corporate future is also fertile ground for novelists to explore another element central to literature: that is, language. Something happens to the way we speak, and to the way we think, when we become enthralled by the things we buy and sell—either by our own deviant choices or by some external compulsion of force.

At the first level, the words themselves change. For years, brand names have become absorbed into the language, shifting from discrete proper nouns to regular common ones: Frisbee, Kleenex, Xerox, Band-aid. (These words even have a name: proprietary eponyms.) Fictional visions of the future commonly suggest that this process will continue, and perhaps accelerate. A memorable example of this comes from the section of David Mitchell’s novel “Cloud Atlas,” set in a futuristic Korea, in which a genetically engineered clone confesses to a crime in modified English, speaking of “sonys” (technological devices) “nikes” (shoes) and “fords” (cars). Mitchell uses his clone narrator to create a portrait of the future, to satirize the present, and, most simply but not inconsequentially, to create a flashy and beguiling style of prose:

As people’s shared diction relies increasingly on the words of consumer goods and marketing, it begins to alter not only speech but the scope of metaphor and the imagination. George Saunders, in his short story “Jon,” gives us a world in which teen-agers are raised as semi-confined consumer-marketing test groups, charged with reviewing products and watching various videos organized by “Location Indicators,” or “LI”s. The narrator is Jon, who, like Mitchell’s clone character, speaks in a slangy patois that leans heavily on stock phrases, and features, as is common in speculative literature, smatterings of irregular capitalization, as if ideas themselves have become products. Here, Jon talks about the first time he had sex:

And though I had many times seen LI 34321 for Honey Grahams, where the stream of milk and the stream of honey enjoin to make that river of sweet-tasting goodness, I did not know that, upon making love, one person may become like the milk and the other like the honey, and soon they cannot even remember who started out the milk and who the honey, they just become one fluid, this like honey/milk combo.

The next time you hear someone explain a singular moment in their lives using the language of advertisements, pop song, sitcoms, or romance novels, it will be worth pausing to ask: Are we all already unwitting participants in a culture-wide focus group?

Finally, at its most imperceptible—and thus most extreme—the language of commerce drills down to place in the brain far more basic than language, taking on an ineffable, almost mystical quality. Don DeLillo, in his novel “White Noise,” published in 1985, presents a family living amidst a culture of ambient disinformation and bio-chemical terror. One night, the head of that family, Jack Gladney, pokes his head into his daughter’s room and hears her murmur the words “Toyota Celica” in her sleep.

It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. … She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.

The critic B. R. Myers has singled this passage out as “uninvolving” and “downright silly.” It is reasonable to wonder: Who talks this way? Who thinks this way? Why would anyone respond to the name of a car in such exalted tones? Fair questions, and the answer to them all is, probably no one. And that is the point: the novel is highly stylized satire, a persistently bitter and daffy joke about the television-enraptured culture of the nineteen-eighties. It is not a realist portrait of a time and place, but of the present projected into a future in which the young people raised on constant marketing might one day become the kind of clones or consumer-slaves imagined by David Mitchell and George Saunders.

Meanwhile, back in the real-world present, it’s likely that we’re some time away from some New Yorker telling a friend to meet him at the Barclays stop. It will remain, for now at least, Atlantic Avenue. Yet history proves that as we get comfortable with a durable sponsorship, our attitudes about it change, and tend to soften. The ING New York City Marathon, for example, is beginning to feel like an institution, what with all that giddy orange everywhere. And if the Mets keep playing well, Citi Field may even start to feel like a friendly ballpark. Out-of-towners, even the ones who watch Fox News, seem to love Times Square. Back in 2009, when the name-change deal was signed, a member of the M.T.A.’s governing board, perhaps trying to head off lamentations about the desecration of public space, told the Times, “It’s not like Taco Bell saying it wants Grand Army Plaza or something like that.” Give it time.

Photograph by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum.

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day